samedi 3 novembre 2012

Mineral oil: a need for more data

Nearly 90% of the U.S.
population has access to paper recycling services, and more than 65% of all
paper that is consumed is recovered. In accordance with theSustainable Packaging Coalition’s(SPC)
Definition of Sustainable Packaging (see www.bit.ly/pwe00427),
it is essential to optimize the use of renewable or recycled source materials
in package design, to help ensure sustainable management flows by encouraging
waste reduction and resource conservation. Utilizing recycled-paper content can
have a number of environmental benefits, such as landfill diversion, energy
savings, and resource conservation, while still meeting the performance
criteria required by many packaging manufacturers.

There are tremendous opportunities to increase and utilize recycled-paper
content in packaging, but we need to be aware of products entering the
recycling stream. By designing products from the start with sustainability and
their full life-cycle impacts in mind, they can be made in a way that
facilitates effective reprocessing, ultimately allowing them to become source
materials for new products. The SPC, through its systems-based approach, is
working toward engaging stakeholders throughout the supply chain in an attempt
to make such efforts common practice.

However, this remains a work in progress, and there have been, and will
continue to be, bumps along the way. In early 2011, a number of technical
reports and media stories questioned the quality of recycled paperboard; in
particular, concerns were raised over potential packaging migrants. The
possible migrants were identified as mineral oil hydrocarbons (MOH), with their
primary source being traced back to inks used in newsprint entering the
European recycling stream. The researchers engaged in these studies found that
petroleum-based inks used in European newsprint could potentially migrate from
the recycled content into some food products, with a high degree of variability
between products. The concerns focused on the high levels of uncertainty around
MOH’s potential impacts on the human body and their potential to migrate from
such packaging into foods.